Five years ago, Lindsey Jordan’s OCD entered a “tailspin” – prompted, the musician better known as Snail Mail says, by the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York. Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, the surreal, death-obsessed movie sees Philip Seymour Hoffman play a dramatist whose sense of reality begins to fold in on itself. “I accidentally developed a pretty severe OCD thing about dying from that movie,” Jordan says, plainly. “The all-seeing narrator in it just drops all these awful life spoilers that I’ve been spending so much time in my life consciously not trying to think about. Then it became just a part of everything that I do. And it just started becoming this awful thing that I couldn’t get rid of, where anytime I’d be having a rewarding time or doing something I care about, it would ruin me being present.”
This destabilising period resonates throughout Jordan’s muscular and atmospheric new album, Ricochet, the third Snail Mail LP after her 2018 breakthrough Lush and 2021’s Valentine. It’s almost certainly her best work to date: a melancholy, probing, 11-song record about mortality and existential dread that falls, she says, just shy of a concept album. “I don’t know if those exist, really, truly, anymore – but it is capturing everything about who I think I am right now. I don’t want to do it a disservice by calling it another ‘diary record’. I called Lush a diary record, but that gets sort of pigeonhole-y, because I’m like, ‘a girl with a diary’. Know what I mean?”
